


The More They Stay the Same

by ethrosdemon



Category: True Blood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:59:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ethrosdemon/pseuds/ethrosdemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thousand years of memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The More They Stay the Same

**Author's Note:**

  * For [concertigrossi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertigrossi/gifts).



The Great Revelation isn't put up for a vote.

Eric bought his house in Shreveport sight unseen. Sophie-Anne had had the audacity to contact him. the coup de grace was the job offer. Sheriff? Of some backwoods nowhere that made Mayberry look appealing? He'd been too amused to challenge her to a duel. The house smells of mold and decay. It's settled into it's piece of earth, the foundations not at all where they were laid. The oak trees in the yard are an American variety, not exactly the trees in his memories, but close enough for nuclear war or horse shoes.

He can feel Pam stirring in room she's using until she forgives him enough to let him buy her her own place. She thinks sulking and shredding his magazines is punishment, or maybe she missed him and is lingering for her own reasons that he doesn't analyze. She might have been happy in Lisbon, and he didn't blow her life apart lightly. Women understand each other in ways men cannot; he confronted that truth too long ago to rethink it. Eric needs Pam until he tires of Louisiana.

The tap engages in the back bathroom and crickets scream in the yard, and he wonders if this is what domestic life is like for humans these days. He doesn't care, but keeping up with the prey is always advisable. He settles behind his desk--heavy oak inlayed with bone, a gift from Miss Pamela--and clicks through his email. Sophie-Anne has some tech-savvy minions who have been digitalizing records in anticipation of the Big Reveal. She must not know that they CC him on everything. He smiles as he clicks open the email with the bank account passwords.

Pam saunters into the room in a green silk kimono, her hair down.

"You're not bothering to dress tonight? Pouting becomes you or I'd be annoyed." He watches as she cases the room, hands brushing over books in shelves and artifacts not valuable to keep locked away.

"They're really doing this," Pam flicks her eyes over the official envelope from what she calls Mission Control sitting on his desk. He hasn't broken the wax seal, has barely even looked at it.

"Seems so." One of the many lessons Eric's learned over the years is that vampires are just as good at making their existences needlessly complicated as humans--plus they have far longer to tighten the useless knots.

"I assume that's why I'm here. Sophie-Anne isn't worth my time." The hair flip is egregious, but delicious.

He can't help the small smile at her tone and the scathing look she tries to flay him with. He kicks back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. "Pamela, you always have been insightful. I'm opening a bar."

"That sounds like work." She smoothes her hair behind her ear and all but sniffs down her nose at him.

"That is correct. This is America. I will become an entrepreneur."

"Sounds an awful lot like manure." Her eyes meet his and her haughty facade cracks enough for them to share in each other, the unspeaking bond all makers have with their offspring crackles. "Couldn't we do this in L.A.?"

"This situation is too easily manipulated to toss it over for that quagmire."

"Where am I going to _shop_?" She flings herself on his couch and shades her eyes with her forearm. He smiles at her display, marvels at how well she's made, tapering fingers and the delicate jut of her collarbone.

"There's always Wal-Mart." He picks up the envelope sealing their possible doom.

She hisses at him as he opens the Official Decree. He finds the old fashioned formality of the missive to be beautifully juxtaposed to the facts the papers impart.

"That's more your style, darling." Her voice rings with her original accent, dripping Victorian scorn.

Eric has to laugh, because it's true.

The phone rings. Eric makes no move to pick it up. Pam rolls her eyes on the third ring and stomps over to lift the receiver to her ear telegraphing her annoyance. "You were just sitting there," he holds back the laughter.

"FUCK YOU," she mouths. "Hello? How can I direct your call, to my Lord and Master or is this a solicitation?"

"Pamela?"

Eric holds out his hand as Pam nearly swoons. "Godric, hello." The breathlessness in her voice echoes how he himself all too often has sounded in Godric's presence.

"I did not know you were reunited with your maker. This is good."

Eric grabs the phone before a whole conversation can get rolling. "Godric?"

"Jealousy? Still?" There's laughter in the words, or the ghost of it.

"No, I just know if I let you you two will spend hours discussing Romantic poets and abstract paintings." He runs his thumb along the edge of the envelope the fibers pliant and malleable, linen.

Pam forms claws with her hands and holds them in front of her face while baring her fangs. He ignores her.

"I see. I will subside then." Eric has always found it endearing that Godric plays along with the kinds of lies that protect Eric's pride. "You have received a letter?"

"Yes. They persist in this folly. I can only pray for blood in the streets." Eric could stand a little bloodbath these days.

"You always were angry you missed the crusaders in Jerusalem." They pause, a stillness replacing laughter, a holding place for the affection they share. "Humans have too long lived in the poetic darkness. The time has come, as was inevitable." He pauses again, distracted or thinking. "Technology."

Godric early on sided with those who argued that the global financial system would out their kind eventually and that revelation on their own terms was better than the shock of investigative journalists and crusading do-gooders. Eric is less sanguine about the entire ordeal, but the right minds were swayed and the decision was made.

"You will remain in Texas?"

"I have obligations to my nest. I will see them through this event."

Eric smiles at Godric's paternal tendencies, which have only increased over the years.

"You mock my earnestness. Your day shall come." Neither one of them has to say Pam's name. Eric watches her flip through a woman's wear catalog. "Perhaps it already has?" Godric laughs with little bursts of breath, his teasing voice.

Pam looks up at that and cuts Eric a sour face.

"I am a dealer of death, a wraith in the night spilling the blood of innocents," Eric intones without inflection.

"Are you also the monarch of the seas?" Godric asks with false child-like wonder.

Pam collapses in laughter, her magazine flying out of her hands.

"You deface me in front of my offspring, master. How can I rule with an iron fist when you lay me so low?"

"You will remain in your current kingdom, my child?" Godric returns to the point of his call, Pam subsiding at his query, her eyes directly meeting Eric's.

"This backwater is as defensible as any position for riding out this situation." The house creaks around them, already semi-familiar.

"Like father like son?"

"You honor me to say so."

"Bismillah."

The line goes dead. Eric hangs the receiver on the cradle.

"I wondered why he wasn't in Tokyo or the Bay Area or anywhere where the humans are running marathons on their little gerbil wheels of scientific endeavor or whatever." Pam stands up and brushes her hands down the front of her kimono.

"He likes the heat," Eric says idly. He reads the decree. They haven't demanded he participate directly, and he doesn't mistake that for respect; it's just common sense.

*

_Oh, how many nights you ripped his veil to shreds with a wine burning like the stars. The darkest of eyelids hastens, as though from his cheek; in the midst of honeyed saliva are his teeth._

*

Opulence and decadence of the south shocks him. He could pretend otherwise, but that kind of useless pride hasn't ever been his way. He is proud of his sword arm, of his knowledge of pleasure and how to give it, of his wit and ability to craft a verse. But knowledge of such things as writing and scholarship, times past and that which came before, he never knew before passing over into vampire. What use did he have of those matters when his life was _living_ each moment?

He's not alive anymore, so he has time to learn. Much time.

"The men in the lands beyond here speak a different language than these in this land. They have different customs and religion."

"Andalus." Eric watches the pet of their host, brazen and unafraid surrounded by vampires. He has an indolent look about him that Eric recognizes as the effects of poppy juice.

"You know of them?" Godric huddles closer, his hand wrapping around Eric's wrist. His fingers do not meet.

"Of course. My brother hired his sword for many years in the southern lands."

"A brother?"

Eric's eyes are torn from their host and his pet at Godric's shocked voice. "I'm sure he's dead."

They've been together for twenty cycles of the seasons. His brother was far his elder, his parents' first child while Eric was the last. If the Turks didn't get him, age must have.

"Why did you never tell me of your brother?" Godric seems unsettled, displeased in some way, which makes Eric mourn, quake with unhappiness.

"I would write you a saga of each of my living days, if you had just asked."

"Be still, my child." Godric tightens his grip on Eric's wrist. "You misunderstand me. In my separation from humans I am forgetting such things as siblings and family constructs. I did not even think to ask."

Godric falls into one of his moods. Eric goes back to watching the human across the room, his scent alluring even if his attitude is less so.

"That one is off limits." Godric murmurs to him, his hand strong around the bones of Eric's arm.

*

There are always wars. Where war rages, death hides in plain sight. Eric thought they would follow the screams of the friars and the clattering of horse tackle to the City and Outremer beyond.

"A companion of mine dwells hither in the peninsula." Godric looks as natural amongst the linen and silk of the nobility's bedding as he does crouched in the snow covered in gore.

Eric is learning the mysteries of the dip and slide of the Arabic script.

"Just so," says Godric, the ink on his fingers on top of the skin instead of under it. He takes pride in Eric's precise calligraphy. The portable desk lies between them on the bed, another device Eric could never have conceived of in his human life.

Eric scribbles dictation with a roll of the quill, the dots and slashes that represent words signifying cool water on the tongue, shade obscuring the white eye of the sun, words of love and longing and emotions Eric feels are weak, pathetic, unmanly.

"Ridiculous," Eric rakes his eyes across the poem. He can read the passages quite easily even though this is not Arabic but Persian.

"Islam subsumes what is ancient, remakes the foundations of what has lasted since before Alexander." Godric watches him with his pleased, excited expression. "This is _new_."

New is important somehow. For Eric almost everything is new. He has much to learn, but he recognizes that his own newness is part of his value to his maker. He wonders if there is a date on his utility.

"Tell me of your companion." Eric scribbles, his mind far off on a moonlit battlefield, dismembered heads and arms strewn about him, glory on his tongue and sliding down his throat.

"She is the muse to poets, has been almost since poetry existed."

_She_. Eric is glad to hear that.

Godric laughs, the sound startling Eric into scraping ink across the precious page. "I wish I could remember jealousy. Which is more delicious, the rage or the absence of it again, when you realize there was nothing to fear?"

Eric keeps his eyes down, opens his mouth to lie--because this is too much, unbearable. The ache he feels consumes him and the exposure of his longing, he absolute need to be everything at once, to be Godric's entire world, he thinks maybe this is shame he feels.

"No!" The ink and tablet fly away too fast for a human eye to track, but Eric sees every flicker of muscle as Godric launches himself to bear Eric back on the bed. Godric holds him by the throat. "You do not _understand_." He stares unblinking into Eric's eyes. "_I_ need _you_."

Eric still wears his human life close to his skin. He remembers who he was and what he felt. The love he had for his wife and children. The arrogance of a well-made form and the wit to lure other men's wives and daughters. That man would not bare his throat and moan when another man pressed his face against his skin, soft mouth lingering where his pulse no longer beats.

That man is dead, and Eric kills him again and again when Godric presses against him. To be desired beyond all measure is a gift, one Eric had to learn to accept.

Godric nips his throat, a tiny prick of teeth, and flies across the room. "There was a time when I would take what I desired and have no thought for anything else. I cannot remember why."

He leaves the chamber. To feed, as he usually does after this sort of scene. Eric wipes ink across his chest wondering again how many ways he has to say yes for this to end.

*

Humans are easily thralled, employed for their native stupidity and docility. Eric was at first surprised by the system in place in the southlands for the sharing of human chattel. The feeling is fleeting. He realizes almost immediately that it's fitting that the food should be put to greater and wider use as well.

They travel during the day swaddled and stored away from the sun, ridden in carts by someone's humans. He never bothers to ask whose. Godric is shown the usual deference which is his due, and while Eric does not trust other vampires any more than he does humans, he understands the politics of the issue--betrayal of Godric would result in the death of the betrayer and the uprooting of his entire line, maker, child, grandchildren, until the very last. They are protected by tradition. Human laws are ash on the wind compared to the weight of that tradition.

When the sun sets, the retinue rises and a bloodbath of waiting victims culled by the servant humans begins. It's all very civilized, no hunting, no chase. It bores Eric. Several days into their journey from Acquitainia, he stops feeding. He watches as Godfrey and Melusine share a thralled girl. She's suspended between them with her eyes closed in rapture, and it's just all too...composed. He stalks away from the encampment and heads for thicker woods.

"You would hunt for your own meal?" Godric appears at his side, clad in leather, the moonlight bright on his perfect face.

"They disgust me." There's the thick scent of humanity to the east. Eric crouches down and listens to the wind and the creaks of the trees. The land gives him unease, so different from the pristine woods of the north.

"This is ritual. Where the population of humans is concentrated we have to play a game to feed. There are rules, as I have imparted. You can find pleasure in the precision of the game. You can perfect it."

Eric gazes up at Godric. "Do you believe any of that?"

Godric shifts so that his face is in the shadow of a tree bough. "I strayed upon you because I long for a by-gone era sometimes. A nostalgia for simpler times, perhaps."

"When you weren't constrained by the rules of lesser men."

Godric laughs, quiet huffs that startle birds in the trees. "This is not how I would describe my feelings."

"Part of being superior is never having to boast. Some things speak for themselves."

In the distance, human voices raise drunkenly in song. An easy kill, no better than the pathetic humans in the camp.

*

Eric wakes his first night in Ishbilya on a soft pallet amidst bundles of pillows. The air smells unfamiliar, spices mixed with blood and strange flowers. He is alone and his chamber is not lit. He creeps out of the room careful of the marble beneath his feet, slick and cold. He finds himself in a corridor lined with pillars. The roof overhead mimics the night sky, constellations cluster together in patterns he's never witnessed. He stands still and gazes up in wonder.

"The harvest sky over Babylon, several ages ago."

Eric turns casually, as if he knew someone was there all along. A girl peers up at him, her eyes huge and dark behind long lashes. Her skin is pale but not the dead white of his own, in life she would have been bronze, darker than the gold hanging in coins from her ears, throat, wrists. When she steps towards him he sees she's bedecked at her ankles and toes as well.

She smells familiar, holds herself similarly to Godric.

"You are so large!" She smiles up at him and reaches to touch his face. "Blue eyes." She sighs. "They still startle me, I must say. Unnatural." She speaks to him in his own language, accented by the east, but perfect all the same.

He doesn't speak, doesn't want to give any ground when she seems content to chatter at him.

"Once they said your kind were like speaking beasts, clever enough to mime speech, but not clever enough to understand the use of words. Were those stories true?"

"I left you for mere minutes, and you stalk off to find him?" Godric steps out from around a pillar and sighs affectedly at the girl. "Impatience, after all these years?"

"I grow more impatient as I age, not less." Her words come with a smile and a dismissive flutter of her hand. "They are strange looking, I can't help myself!"

"This is just one, not them all, and his name is Eric." Godric moves closer to her, their bodies seeming to weave in an unspoken pattern. Eric feels the rage peek out of its hiding place.

"I don't know how you have the patience for all the teaching and..." she lapses into another language, one with an odd rhythm. Godric watches her with a half smile on his face. Eventually she runs out of words. Godric lays a hand on her cheek and her neck goes slack so that he's holding her head aloft.

"Even amidst all of this learning and change, you are ever the same." He smiles, but Eric doesn't think there's humor there, maybe resignation of some kind.

She answers him in the sinewy language Eric doesn't understand. Godric doesn't respond. Her eyes leave Godric's face and fall on Eric. "You can call me Fatima, as do those here," she tells him. He doesn't ask what her real name is.

*

Ishbilya is a city of running water and magnificence the like of which Eric could never have imagined. Palm trees impress him, their unlikelihood fascinating. Fatima has a court, not a cluster of enthralled humans and a nest of other vampires, but an entire court of humans and vampires who work in concert to orchestrate her every whim. Poets, mathematicians, astronomers, performers with animals called monkeys--Eric can't decide if he's impressed or revolted.

Eric is expected to sit in a place of honor as she's attended by her servants and advisors. Everyone else settles on cushions under the clear night sky as Fatima sits on a low couch. Men chew leaves of plants Eric has never seen.

Fatima assumes that Eric can't understand the language of the land and translates conversations for him. Or she offers her interpretation of what was said, which is usually not what's being said at all.

"He's planning to make off with his nestmate's favorite human." Fatima explains as lamps throw dancing shadows over their faces. The man speaking had actually complimented his nestmate's good taste, nothing more.

"I am fatigued." Godric rises and offers his hand down to Eric who takes it as he stands as well.

Fatima smiles up at them. "Ah," she murmurs. "Good day to you then." She glances at Eric. "To you both."

Eric listens avidly as they turn to leave, the sense of ambush looming strong. Nothing happens except for a servant appearing silently to show them to their chambers.

Godric places his hand on Eric's arm to indicate he wants Eric to spend the day with him, an occurrence that is less frequent in civilization than it was in their years together roaming the wilder places. Godric's chamber shines with gold and lapis in the lamp-light. His pallet is large enough for three men the size of Eric.

Godric shrugs off his robes and sighs heavily. "She thinks I don't plan to keep you."

This stops Eric mid-motion undressing. "Do you?"

Godric smiles over his shoulder. "How can you be of any doubt? She is...fixed in her ways and judges me upon ancient patterns."

"Why does she think you will discard me?" Eric returns to his clothes, angry at himself for his childish inability to control his emotions.

"Because we are not lovers." Godric settles against the pillows and immediately sits to rearrange them, murmuring to himself.

"How can she know that?" This is not an ability he's heard of.

"Upon long acquaintance." The pillows slip and slide as Godric tries to wrestle them into a pleasing configuration.

Eric's anger eclipses his better judgment. "Is she your maker?" he barks. It is not taboo to ask such a thing, but he never has. The moment feels brittle.

Godric watches him for longer than is comfortable, still as the death he brings. "No," he says finally. "She is my...sister, if I can term it that way. We share a maker."

Eric flies to the pallet, rage and jealousy and the unending ache ripping away any ability to behave humble and respectful. "Why are we here? Why did you bring me here?"

Godric looks up at him, his expression placid even with Eric's forearm against his throat. "It is customary. And I am proud of you, my child. I wanted her to see my love for you."

The rage doesn't lessen at that. If Godric is so proud, why does he hold back physical release for them both? "I'm good enough to be paraded around like a prized slave but not to be bedded?"

Godric knocks him aside with little effort. He raises to his knees and looms over Eric laying on his back amongst the pillows. "Why do you persist in offering what you do not yourself desire?"

The laugh is unexpected and unfortunate, but Eric can't hold it in. The teeth in his neck are less unexpected.

Eric's desire almost paralyzes him. The connection between them throbs, Godric's lust causing him to shudder against Eric's chest as he swallows. Eric's fingers tugs at Godric's hair before the feeding renders him unable to complete what they've started. Godric slides his mouth from the wound on Eric's neck up to his jaw and over his chin to his mouth smearing blood along the way. The scent of metal crushes against the honey and spice flavor of the local feeding stock. Godric feeds him a mouthful of his own blood. Before the kiss can begin to satisfy Eric, Godric leans back and offers his own throat.

Eric doesn't have the audacity to lunge. "No."

Godric peers down at him and the weight of every second of his long life fills the room. "Do you not want this binding?"

The blood of the child is always just as much the blood of the maker, there for feeding or offering to others. But the blood of the maker is sacred, his own to keep and horde. They have never discussed this, but the taboo is strong in the vampire world. To feed from your maker is to be his equal, his beloved.

And this? This is what Eric truly wants, not the gratification of mutual release and heavy sleep, but the knowledge that Godric wants _him_, cherishes him above all others. Eric wants the bond not the bedding.

However, if one comes with the other, he's not going to turn it down.

He hesitates because he wants Godric's bared neck, his offering up of himself, _more than anything_, and admitting that leaves him vulnerable in an unique way.

"Do you think I don't know?" Godric asks him in a soft tone, and Eric can't bear to have the words hang in the air, can't discuss this, never, the loss of pride is too great.

He reaches up and pulls Godric down across his chest, rests his mouth against Godric's throat and offers the very last prayer he over does--to Thor, an apology. He breaks the skin and tastes Godric's blood for the second time. He doesn't need Godric's fingers wrapped around him, the long pull of perfect fingers or the dark moans falling out of Godric's mouth to push him over into oblivion.

Godric mouth is greedy as Eric lies pliant, leaving small bites on shoulders, arms, belly. He feeds again from the inside of Eric's leg, the pleasure turning to pain as he feeds and feeds until Eric is weak. Godric's mouth against his feels like what Eric remembers of dreaming, not quite real and the realest experience at once.

Godric whispers to him in a language he thinks he should understand but doesn't.

*

_And the proud night lets the crow set flight, but the dawn rejects it with a cold grey hand._

*

Eric has no real opinions about technology other than pollution makes blood taste bad and anything that cuts down on travel time is welcome Music recording devices streamline the music-listening experience as you don't have to thrall and kidnap an entire quartet to enjoy a favorite piece of music. . He enjoys radio and television, but in an idle way.

Pam has abandoned him for a New Orleans shopping excursion on his platinum card as payback for her summons. He wonders if she'll brazenly show her true self off now that she can. She's always been mercurial when it comes to humans.

The ads for synthetic blood seem to have blanketed the globe overnight. He thinks they probably literally did, but he's not involved with the PR types.

Eric watches The Great Revelation coverage on Al Jazeera. In some parts of the world vampires had been an open secret for centuries. The countries of the former Ottoman Empire, for example. Fatima appears on the screen and he turns the volume up. He's been waiting for her interview.

"We have long been co-travelers with humanity in this world. We are companions, can vampires not come openly into the Ummah?"

Eric laughs. She's wearing coin earrings and a matching necklace.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to stoney321, elizah_jane, and everyone else who read this over or listened to me talk about it.
> 
> The quotes are from an untitled poem written in Al-Andulus and surviving in fragments.


End file.
